Intersubjective Agreement (IA) reduces friction between report and visual experience

Abstract

Chuyin et al. (2022) developed a novel free report paradigm and found that participants were able to report specific descriptions of natural scenes after briefly seeing them (with backward masking). Hirschhorn and Mudrik (2024) tried to replicate the study and proposed four challenges towards the paradigm, questioning its validity. However, due to a key methodological difference, their experiments can only be seen as partial replications of the original study. Here, we reply to all the challenges by Hirschhorn and Mudrik. Furthermore, we discuss issues that go beyond these original studies and that are critical for the consciousness science at large. In particular, we review controversial concepts, including gist and richness. Most importantly, we argue that participants’ reports about their experience should not be rejected by experimenters’ expectations about their experience, which is a fundamental issue in consciousness research. Instead of the (researchers’ expected) veridicality of experiences, focus should be put more on the “what-it-is-like” to be a participant. We also highlight that our free-report paradigm is designed to quantify the specificity of reported words rather than richness. Finally, we show that freely descriptive words reflect participants’ conscious perception. A set of 5 response words is enough to specify the presented image to the degree that is way above the chance.